


Dresser Drawer

by moodiful819



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, Gen, Humor, One Shot Collection, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-05
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-14 00:39:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodiful819/pseuds/moodiful819
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a collection of gift-fics and oneshots from my tumblr. Various ratings and genres.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pet Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a little known fact in Konoha, but Sakura has a fondness for pet names.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by a fanart dimisfit made on her tumblr.

It's a little known fact in Konoha, but Sakura has a fondness for pet names. "Sasuke-kun" was merely the beginning, and honestly, he thinks the Uchiha got off easy. Ino's title of "pig" is now a callous endearment between rivals, Neji is sometimes affectionately referred to in anecdotes as "negi," and as her boyfriend, Kakashi is called everything under the sun.

Animals seem to be a favored topic with a strong leaning towards puns and idiomatic phrases, as in recent memory she has called him "my dearie deer," "my silver fox," and "grumpy goat." In the back of his head, he wonders what's so wrong with his given name. Scarecrows may not be as cute, but they were practical and it was what was written on his birth certificate. What was more, he hated the pet names with a passion. They were annoying, and what was more,  _they were embarrassing._

Still, he doesn't have the heart to tell her this. It is a petty thing to start an argument over anyway, so he keeps quiet and tries to ignore the vague tendril of resentment growing in his chest.

However, that is before he gets word that she is finally back from her mission after three days without a word. Before he takes in the sight of her eye-patch, the splinted arm, and the bandages around her head. In his mind, the medical report fires off like gunfire: fractured ulna, fractured skull, surgery to remove shrapnel from her eye. Grimly, he thinks that they can be mirrors for their respective eye-injuries—what had been the word she used before? "Twinsies?"

It doesn't matter though. Nothing does, and the realization of how petty everything is and can be crashes on him like a collapsing building as the fact that she is alive hits him.  _Really hits him_ , because he never knew how close he came to losing her until Tsunade gave him clearance and briefed him of the mission details.  _Explosion in a weapons factory,_ and he knows how those three miserable, agonizing days nearly became just a drop in the bucket. (Only nearly though.)

Grateful, he sinks to the floor by her bed and tries to keep a firm, steady grip on her hand, but it's hard when there's a god-awful sob wracking his chest and shoulders. Gently, she scoops him into her lap, threading her fingers through his hair with her good hand.

"I'm not going anywhere, you silly goose," she softly chides from her hospital bed, and the annoyance he feels at her pet names becomes smaller and smaller until it shrinks out of existence, blinking out like a dying star. It was never worth it anyway, a fact that has only been magnified by the recent circumstances, and the fight is over before it even begins.

If it means her being alive and hearing her voice, he decides, she can call him anything she wants.


	2. Hokage-sama

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, it was good to be Hokage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another response-fic for dimisfit for her picture on the KSAnon tumblr.

"Kakashi, a word."

The silver-nin paused, foot frozen mid-step in his path to the door as he wondered if his involuntary jerk had shown? There had been an edge to her tone that he did not like, and briefly, the Copy Nin debated whether to ignore or obey the demand.

Dutifully, he turned on his heel and deposited himself before the desk.

"Yes, Hokage-sama?"

"Your report is late. Again," his superior groused, an irritated brow ticking in time with her tone.

"Ah, yes." He chuckled nervously, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck in agitation. "Well, you see, I was on my way to doing it when—"

"Save it, Hatake," she snapped before releasing a sigh that sent her sagging over the wooden desk. "Kakashi, you can't keep doing this. We need those reports.  _Promptly._ " She sent him a meaningful look, hoping he would understand that these reports were key for issues of national safety, getting paid, and everything else that made her position annoying and difficult. (No wonder shishou had drank so much on the job.) She sighed; hopefully he would at least have the decency to look cowed.

Kakashi, of course, did neither, and a brief staring contest ensued. However, the battle of wills was soon concluded as Sakura sighed and covered her face with a perfectly manicured hand. "I guess I'll let it slide… _again."_

"Thank you, Hokage-sama." He began towards the door again.

"But…!" He stopped and looked over his shoulder, meeting her defiant gaze. "It's gonna cost you."

"And what would that be?"

Her lips twitched into a smile. "A kiss."

Kakashi feigned a scandalized look. "Are you suggesting that I bribe you, Hokage-sama?"

Sakura raised a brow in challenge. "Are you questioning an order from a superior?"

"No, Hokage-sama," he answered, and slowly tugged his mask down.

Leaning over the desk, she tipped up the rim of her hat and met him halfway, tasting the smile in his kiss. Pulling away, she reached over and buzzed the intercom on her left.

"Izumo, cancel my appointments for the rest of the day."

"Yes, Hokage-sama," came the grainy reply. Kakashi looked up from the box near his hip and arched a brow at his former-student.

"Am I finished, Hokage-sama?"

"I don't know. Are you?" came the reply.

Kakashi smiled rakishly. "Perhaps I have been neglectful in paying my respects lately. Allow me to remedy that," he answered huskily. Indulgently, Sakura leaned back in her chair and waited for her boyfriend to circle the desk.

Sometimes, it was good to be Hokage.


	3. One Step towards Normal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was the same Kakashi he had always been; he was just missing another part of himself now… Or at least, that’s what he told himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is unedited, but annual birthday update achieved! I am now old enough to legally drink. Additionally, I am drowning in midterms still for my senior year of college, so maybe I could use all the alcohol I can get. Also, the Tina Turner reference at the end was completely unintentional.

It had started in January. It had just been a silly thing really—just another silly couple-activity…another opportunity to bring a still-burgeoning relationship closer…build another memory… But in January, they put a list of costume ideas in a hat. The plan was when Halloween rolled around, they would choose an idea from the hat randomly and that would be their costume.

That was, of course, before the war...before he lost his leg.

The details were still sketchy, that part of his medical history just a vague collection of meaningless sentences. Those who were there with him saw nothing, and even with the help of Yamanaka-clan mental techniques, Kakashi couldn't recall what had happened to him.

One minute he was on the front lines. The next, he was gone, only to be found by a scout team miles away, battered and bruised with his right leg mangled horribly as if it had been crushed in the jaws of a wild animal. The scout team didn't know what to make of it, this sudden reappearance of a man who had disappeared from the battlefield in front of everyone only hours before…

But then Kakashi plummeted into shock, and suddenly how he got there was no longer important as the medic onboard began tearing into his pack. Two members offered their camp supplies, blankets and extra hands, while another member of the team went to flag the medic squad for help. But he was still seizing, nerves blinking and body tensing as it fought uselessly against the tide that continued to ebb out of him. He had already lost too much blood when they had found him.

By the time the other medics had arrived, they had stabilized him as best they could with what little they had, but the most important decision had yet to be made: his leg or his life?

They could have regenerated his leg, they would tell him later. If it had been any different, they would have saved it. They had the capability for it—Shizune may not have been able to use her teacher's techniques on herself, but she knew how to use it on others, and there were enough medics available for her to draw chakra reserves from—and this was Kakashi. Regardless of their personal losses, the silver-haired nin was too much of a valuable resource to Konoha for them to lose.

But time was ticking, and blood continued to dribble out in rivers between the cracks in his flesh. His lips were turning blue, and whatever had attacked him had also traumatized his chakra system into a state of paralysis. No jutsu would've been effective on him in this state—and  _"Captain—the gash over his chest-he's bleeding into his abdomen!"_

She asked herself what would he want her to do. She asked herself if she was making the right decision. As a soldier, as a medic, as a friend…

" _Captain!"_

Making the call, Shizune charged the familiar blue glow to her fingertips and cut above the knee.

* * *

Rehabilitation was long and arduous. Though he had lost his leg in April, he hadn't been able to leave his bed until June, and only left the hospital in August, spending months being shuttled between physical therapy and staring at the white walls, the exercise machines, the television, his IV Line…anything but the empty space he knew he would find if he looked down.

During his stay in the hospital, he had expected her to leave. She may have spent whatever time she could spare at his bedside, but it had to have been out of obligation…out of guilt. She couldn't have actually loved him the way he was, and he couldn't blame her. The future he had ahead of him would've been too much of a strain on her, on them. It would be better if they broke up, and he told her as much.

Except she didn't take it like he expected her to. She cried, of course, but rather than crying out of relief and walking out the door, she took his hand up in hers. "What you're going through now, it affects  _both_  of us. We're in it together, and if you ever think so little of me and how I feel about you again—Kami, help me—I am grabbing you by your good leg and flinging you out a window."

It was hard to argue after a proposal like that, and true to her word, she stuck by him through everything. Every physical therapy appointment, every patience-testing renovation to their shared apartment, they went through together. After months of hard work, Kakashi was allowed a clean-bill of health.

He also received a crutch.

It was a strange thing walking with a crutch. Though he was getting used to walking around with it, he couldn't help but resent it. It may have helped with his mobility, but every tottering, uneven step he took made it more apparent that he was missing a piece of himself, that he was different in an irreversible, alienating way.

He should've been thankful, he knew. It could have been worse, and in the pit of his stomach, he knew Shizune had made the right decision. After all, what was a leg if it meant losing your life? But on some of Kakashi's bitterest days, he wished that they had let him die. After all, he may have been alive, but what use was a shinobi who couldn't fight?

He could teach at the Academy, sure. It had been an option that many people had presented him with. Rationally, it was the best fit for someone of his skills and situation, but it didn't sit well with him. He liked to think it was because the last time someone had trusted him with their kids, he had nearly killed them all and helped lay the foundations for the Fourth Great Shinobi War—but that was a lie…(or at least, not entirely true. As much as he had screwed Team 7 up, they were also one of the greatest groups to ever come out of Konoha). Rather, what killed him was the fact that he could not serve on the front lines, could not serve in the place where he knew he was of the best use.

He was underestimating himself, he knew. Leg or no, he was still pretty capable in a fight—but fighting like he used to was no longer an option—whole swathes of jutsu had now been wiped from the board, stolen from reach—and his reliance on a crutch was crippling in a fight…

Absently, he traced the dark bruise in his side where Naruto's foot had connected with his ribs during their last training session, the place where he had been hit after his crutch had been knocked out from under him. Again, the possibility of teaching raised itself in his head...

But he knew deep down he would never be satisfied. He was always a better warrior than a teacher, but as much as he wanted to fight, it wasn't a possibility. His height and body proportions made learning to fight with his crutch nearly impossible, and while there were prosthetics available, their current caliber made them only useful for home application. A friend of Tenten's was currently working on improving the technology and promised Kakashi the first working model to make his life more like it used to be, and while he was touched, it did little to fill the void below his knee or in his heart.

* * *

"Do we need this?"

Looking up from his seat on the bed, Kakashi spied the box of cards in her hand and nodded his head. "Those are old Christmas cards from relatives. I should probably go through those," he told her.

It was September, a month after Kakashi had been released from the hospital. Since his release, the two of them had been systematically going through their apartment, trying to figure out how to rearrange things for Kakashi's new needs. Today, they were cleaning out their shared closet in preparation to lower the shelves inside.

Reaching farther back, Sakura grabbed a round hat box, turning on the stepladder. "What about—Oh!"

At her tone of surprise, Kakashi looked up to see what was wrong when he saw what she had in her hand, mirroring her reaction. "Oh."

Grabbing his crutch from its rested position against the wall, he began to get up, but Sakura was already pushing him back down, and sat beside him on the bed, an old top hat between their legs.

"We completely forgot about this," said Sakura, tracing the rim of the hat fondly.

"We did," Kakashi agreed, though with the war and everything, it was easy to lose track of it. But he held his tongue, instead asking, "Do you want to pick one?"

At first, her brows furrowed together; she didn't know what he meant until he let his hand drop into the sea of folded slips, rustling the white waves with his fingertips.

"You mean…?"

He shrugged. "Why not? Halloween's coming up soon, and it'd be interesting to see what we came up with. I don't remember what we wrote down."

Just as he expected, Sakura smiled with the kind of giddy excitement he hadn't seen her with for a while, watching as a jack-o-lantern grin split across her face.

"Alright, but you're picking."

Hat held out to him, he glanced at her from the corner of his eye, but did as he was told, his "price to pay" for suggesting the idea.

Plucking one of the slips from the hat, he unfolded the paper and read out the suggestion.

"'The Steadfast Tin Soldier,'" he said slowly, brows creased as he puzzled over the name. "I don't know what this is."

He turned towards Sakura in hopes of an explanation, only to find her staring back at him, ashen-white with horror, as if someone had plunged her into an ice bath and forgotten to let her breathe.

"Sakura…?"

"We shouldn't have done this. We should've just thrown this thing away," she murmured into her hand, her eyes filling with tears as she stared at him unseeingly. "I should have never written that slip."

Reaching out to her, he watched as she jerked away as if burned, and bit back the urge to flinch. "Sakura…I don't understand. What's the steadfast tin soldier? What's so bad about it?"

She blinked. "You really don't know?"

"No. I want you to explain it to me, explain why you reacted the way you did."

And she did, giving a brief summary of the children's tale: of the tin toy with the missing leg, of the ballerina, of his journey through the gutter, of the heart of melted tin.

Placing a hand over his, she leaned against his shoulder. "We don't have to do it, you know," she told him. "We put it in before we ever knew what had happened. It's okay to choose another costume idea."

Quietly, Kakashi stared at the crumpled slip of paper in his hand.

"No…let's do it," he replied softly.

Feeling Sakura's stare on his masked face, he covered her hand with his, squeezing reassuringly. "It'll be alright. You'll see."

And tonight, they would see. After a month and hard work, it was finally the night of the village's Halloween party. They had been up all night sewing and gluing the final pieces of their costumes, making sure everything was perfect for their arrival. And it was. Their costumes were stunning: Sakura was a gorgeous ballerina while Kakashi was the spitting image of a toy tin soldier.

But it did nothing to quell the nervous trill that rattled up Kakashi's spine as they walked the lonely cobblestone road from their apartment to the party. As they walked, he could feel his crutch slipping over the smooth stones. Every knock, every wobbling step sent his mind reeling with frustration and anxiety. A third of the way to the party, Kakashi suddenly stopped.

"This was a bad idea."

Though he had initially agreed because he had something to prove to both the village and himself, all his misgivings, all his fears—everything he had ignored when he agreed to this plan—had begun to seep in under his skin. Doubts, thick and cloying as tar, began to cling to him, and suddenly he was plagued with regret. This was a silly idea. What was he thinking? Dressing up in this ridiculous get-up with tassels, drawing attention to his missing leg—and all the time he'd wasted on creating a model bayonet from scratch!—he was just going to embarrass himself.

"Maybe it would be better if I just changed costumes. Or better yet, just not go. I could just wait for you at home."

A few paces ahead of him, Sakura turned in place, treading with light steps back to his side as she looked him dead in the eye. "We can go home if you want to, Kakashi," she began. "But even if we go home tonight, there is just going to be another day that you'll have to go out and show the new you to everyone. You can't keep hiding, Kakashi. You'll have to leave the house one of these days," she said firmly.

He knew. He knew he had to leave the house, that he had to stop hovering around the select few people he let see him in his new condition and stop avoiding people, but he hated the idea at the same time. He hated the idea of their sudden silences, their stares, their pity… He didn't want their view of him to change; he didn't want to know he had changed into something that couldn't be fixed. He was the same Kakashi he had always been; he was just missing another part of himself now…

Or at least, that's what he told himself.

Skipping ahead, Sakura clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on the balls of her feet. "And while I may be the more superstitious one out of the two of us, maybe you were meant to pick out this costume idea. Maybe you chose it because it was the one you needed most—and don't give me that look!"

Quickly, Kakashi averted his condescending gaze, stifling it into a merely skeptical one as she advanced towards him.

"I'm being serious," she pouted, fitting herself right underneath his nose. "Remember when I was giving you that summary. Remember what happened in the story? Out of his entire regiment, that soldier was the only one who was missing his leg, but that didn't stop him from doing the things he wanted to do or achieve. Losing your leg doesn't make you a lesser man, Kakashi. Letting it affect you does."

For a moment, the older man said nothing as he stared down at her. He didn't move; he didn't breathe, and in the back of her mind, Sakura wondered if she had gone too far…

The familiar feeling of his hand, heavy and warm, on her head dispelled her worries.

Letting his crutch fall against the side of a building, he swept her into his arm, steadying his weight between the both of them as he held her.

"Thank you," he breathed into her hair. "I needed to hear that."

"I just verbally kicked you in the seat of your pants. I don't think you should be thanking me for that," she laughed.

"No, I have to. Sakura, these past few months have been as difficult on you as they were on me. They were more than either of us signed up for, but you still stuck by me even when you didn't have to. Thank you."

As he let his thumb skate her jaw, she tilted her head to meet his gaze.

"Kakashi, I'd love you no matter what happens to you. As hard as it's been, it'd never be something I leave you for, because leg or no leg, it doesn't change who I fell in love with. Actually, it makes you even braver in my eyes."

Leaning up, she pressed her lips against his, soft and sweet. "So if you were hoping to get rid of me that way, you're going to have to try even harder."

He chuckled despite himself. "Does this mean you're going to grab me by my good leg and throw me out a window now?"

Sakura feigned a look of surprise. "You remembered! I'm impressed! Too bad Tsunade wouldn't approve of her apprentice breaking windows with her boyfriend."

"Really? Because I've heard stories—" he began, only to be cut off by a gentle elbow to the side.

"Quit it," she said, but even she couldn't suppress the snicker that escaped her lips. "You're terrible," she told him, but it didn't stop her from kissing him again or from lacing their fingers together as she stood between his feet.

"I guess I'm a keeper then," he breathed, nerves endings firing like explosive tags as every sense picked up on the heat of her skin and the closeness of her frame to his. His free hand dangling at his side, he slipped it onto the curve of her hip, resting its weight there. "So does this mean I can count on you to be my private dancer?"

Leaning to collect his crutch, she smiled at him. "Always," she affirmed, and wrapping an arm around her shoulder, helped steady him on the cobblestone road before setting off once towards the party with a confident step.


End file.
